Critic Reviews
76
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
14(82%)
mixed
3(18%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 17 Critic Reviews
100
Insidious and provocative, Safe refuses to lend a hand, avoids taking sides or pointing the way. Everything that happens in this beautifully controlled enigma is open to multiple interpretations, and that extends finally to the title's meaning as well.
100
We know nothing of this woman’s inner-traumas, the repressed memories or hidden pains of her youth, yet Moore, in an extraordinary milestone performance, gives us a glimpse inside Carol’s frail and lonely soul.
100
This spooky film's ostensible subject—an environmental illness known as multiple chemical sensitivity—is merely a starting place for this mesmerizing horror movie, feminist tract and medical mystery.
100
As a piece of filmmaking, Safe is brilliant for the way Haynes, in concert with cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy and composer Ed Tomney, blankets the mundane in the eerie tone of science fiction and horror, especially in the first half.
100
Todd Haynes' Safe grips you with its air of antiseptic malevolence and leaves you gasping. You feel as disoriented as the protagonist, a young housewife suffering from 20th-century disease. [11 Aug 1995]
89
What Safe does so brilliantly is to plunge us down this frightening rabbit hole with Carol.
83
Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon.
75
Maybe the environment is poisoned, and the group is phony, and Carol is gnawing away at her own psychic health. Now there's a fine mess.
75
Though Haynes' methods are austere and his style dry, the terror of his narrative becomes more palpable as the film unwinds. The picture's eerie delicacy, meticulous technique and rapt formality may distance us, but they also steadily strip bare the panic at its core.
75
For all its flaws and vagueness, Safe is smart, challenging and provocative -- a film that gives you plenty to chew on, long after Carol's sad tale has wound down.
